Welcome to the Forward’s coverage of Jewish culture. Here, you’ll learn about the latest (and sometimes earliest) in Jewish art, music, film, theater, books as well as the secret Jewish history of everything and everyone from The Rolling Stones to…
Culture
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The towering Jewish critic who taught me to grok art and hate Picasso
After Max Kozloff died at 91, a New York community came together to remember and to mourn
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The Cantakerous, Compelling Musings of Poet Bert Meyers
In a Dybbuk’s Raincoat: Collected Poems by Bert Meyers, edited by Daniel Meyers University of New Mexico Press, 295 pages, $24.95. Bert Meyers is what some might call “a poet from the bones.” Meyers, a lyric poet, a proletarian poet, a poet who deplored any and all attempts to categorize a poet, creates work that…
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‘Bubbe Maseh’
Michael Epstein from Milford, N.J., writes: “At a recent Yiddish club meeting, I heard that the expression ‘bubbe maseh’ has nothing to do with a bubbe or grandmother, but has its origins in the name of a medieval knight. Can you shed any light on this?” I’ll be glad to, starting with the observation that…
The Latest
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August 31, 2007
100 Years Ago in the Forward Recently, Jacob S. Heilprin lived in a palace on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Even his wife drove around town in her own automobile. These days, Heilprin finds himself without a job and without a penny to his name. He appeared this week in a Federal Court to declare bankruptcy….
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Music Punk Is Dead
First, legendary New York punk palace C.B.G.B. passed into history. Now, the man who made the club a center of the burgeoning punk scene has passed away: Hilly (Hillel) Kristal, R.I.P.
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Barbarians at the Gate
The Zookeeper’s Wife: A War Story By Diane Ackerman W.W. Norton & Company, 288 pages, $23.95. In 1935, the Warsaw Zoo was an Edenic haven in the urban center. Small deer and peacocks wandered freely along gravel pathways, past lions, tigers, elephants, rhinos, hippos and other creatures enclosed in areas designed to resemble natural habitats….
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Topical Solutions
Lost Between the Edges By Eldon Garnet Semiotext(e)/MIT Press, 240 pages, $14.95. Outcast By Shimon Ballas Translated from the Hebrew by Ammiel Alcalay and Oz Shelach City Lights Publishers, 210 pages, $13.95. The moment a newspaper headline is made, writers of ambition break ranks with journalism and come to attention with books, ostensibly products of…
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Amazing Grace
Those of us of a certain generation can remember exactly where we were sitting, or standing, or lying, when we read the opening lines of Grace Paley’s “The Loudest Voice”: “There is a certain place where dumbwaiters boom, doors slam, dishes crash; every window is a mother’s mouth bidding the street shut up, go skate…
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‘Friends,’ Tel Aviv-style
The quickest way to summarize Eytan Fox’s new film, “The Bubble,” is to describe it as an Israeli version of “Friends.” But unlike the characters in the American television show, these 20-somethings collide with reality in a dramatic fashion. Also, it’s not exactly a comedy. Noam, Yali and Lulu live and work on Sheinkin Street,…
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As the New Year Approaches, a Doctor Reflects on Body and Soul
As the Days of Awe approach, their themes — introspection, forgiveness and, of course, mortality — have undoubtedly started to swirl in many of our minds. But some of us, according to physician and author Sherwin B. Nuland, may have it a bit easier than others. Nuland says that the obligations of the High Holidays…
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Forverts and I
My relationship with the Forverts started in adolescence, when I first heard of it from one of my teachers at the Yidishe Schule in Mexico. He was a refugee from the war and an old-fashioned intellectual with a Sisyphus complex: His fanciful, lifelong mission was to introduce Mexican Jewish youngsters to Yiddish. In class, we…
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One Tale, Many Ways To Tell It
“A Historical Chronicle: The Life of the European Jew in the 20th Century,” an exhibit that runs until September 18 at the Krasdale Gallery in White Plains, N.Y., depicts the rocky journey of Eastern European Jews from the shtetl to the concentration camps to modern-day Israel. The show consists of drawings, collages, photography and sketches,…
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